Craig Reynolds Brings Big-League Experience to Best Cigar Prices as New Advisor
The premium cigar industry runs on institutional knowledge — the kind built over decades of navigating mergers, acquisitions, retail expansions, and the shifting tastes of millions of smokers. When someone with that depth of experience makes a move, the industry notices. Craig Reynolds, the executive who once sat at the helm of the world's largest cigar retailer, has joined Best Cigar Prices and its family of companies as an advisor, and the appointment signals that the Pennsylvania-based retailer is done playing small ball.
Reynolds, who once led Cigars International and General Cigar Co., has joined Best Cigar Prices and its related companies as an advisor. He will serve as an advisor to Greg Fox, the head of New Global Marketing, Inc., the parent company of Best Cigar Prices, a Drums, Pa.-based retailer. It is a pairing that brings together a scrappy, independently owned challenger with one of the most decorated veterans in the American premium cigar trade — a combination that could reshape the competitive landscape at a time when the retail side of the business is consolidating fast.
Who Is Craig Reynolds?
To understand the weight of this hire, it helps to trace how Reynolds built his reputation over more than a decade at Scandinavian Tobacco Group. His wasn't a career defined by a single role or a single company — it was a steady, relentless climb through one of the most complex organizations in the global tobacco industry.
Reynolds joined Cigars International as an executive vice president in February 2009, was promoted to president in 2011, and in 2016 was elevated to EVP of global handmade cigar businesses for Scandinavian Tobacco Group (STG), which owns Cigars International. That trajectory tells a specific story: Reynolds didn't just run a big retailer — he eventually became the boss of bosses across STG's entire premium handmade business in North America.
Shortly after he started, the modern-day STG was formed through a merger that put Cigars International and General Cigar Co. — one of the largest handmade cigar companies — under one corporate entity. For Reynolds, that meant absorbing an enormous portfolio of responsibilities almost from the moment he arrived. The company he was helping to run wasn't merely a retailer. Under its subsidiary General Cigar Co., STG manufactures and distributes premium, handmade cigar brands such as Macanudo and CAO as well as the non-Cuban versions of Partagas, Cohiba, Hoyo de Monterrey and Punch. Managing brands of that stature — with the international recognition and legacy pricing power they carry — demands a fluency in manufacturing, marketing, and retail strategy that very few executives in any industry develop.
The Cigars International Years: A Decade of Transformation
Best known for his work at Cigars International, Reynolds's tenure saw massive change for the world's largest cigar retailer. Under his watch, the company didn't simply maintain its dominant position — it pursued an aggressive growth strategy that added major assets and fundamentally expanded what a cigar retailer could look like.
That era was one of rapid expansion for Cigars International, which acquired PipesAndCigars.com in 2013 and Thompson Cigar Co. in 2018. Each of those acquisitions required Reynolds to integrate distinct customer bases, catalog operations, and brand identities into a coherent enterprise. Thompson Cigar, founded in 1915 and headquartered in Florida, was itself a historic brand with generations of loyal customers — acquiring it without disrupting that loyalty demanded executive finesse, not just deal-making muscle.
The physical retail push was equally ambitious. One of Reynolds' final major projects was the long-planned expansion of physical Cigars International stores outside of Pennsylvania. Towards the end of his tenure, Cigars International opened its first non-Pennsylvania location outside of Dallas; today, the company has 15 stores throughout five states. That expansion from regional Pennsylvania anchor to multi-state physical retailer stands as a genuine operational achievement in a category where brick-and-mortar has faced stubborn headwinds from online competitors and shifting regulatory environments.
Climbing to the Top of STG
Reynolds didn't stop at the retail division. After being promoted to EVP of global handmade cigar businesses for STG, Reynolds was both the head of Cigars International as well as the direct boss of the head of General Cigar Co. The scope of that authority — spanning the manufacturing giant and the world's biggest cigar retailer — placed him at a tier of influence that almost no one else in the handmade premium cigar space has occupied. STG, the owner of popular brands like Macanudo, CAO, and others under its General Cigar subsidiary, had appointed Reynolds to oversee its entire North American business. He was, for a period, the single most powerful figure in American premium cigar retail and distribution.
During that period, the handmade cigar category was a growth engine within STG's business and accounted for more than one-fourth of the company's net sales and profit. That growth didn't happen by accident. It happened because someone was making sharp calls on acquisitions, store expansions, brand investments, and consumer event strategy — the kind of holistic thinking that Reynolds accumulated over more than a decade at the top of the organization.
Life After STG: The Road to Best Cigar Prices
Reynolds left STG in mid-2020. Since then, he took a consulting job with Drew Estate, which came to an end last year. His work with Drew Estate — the brand synonymous with Liga Privada and the infused cigar revolution — showed Reynolds' willingness to operate on the manufacturing and brand side of the industry, not just the retail side. Somewhat quietly, Reynolds had recently worked with Drew Estate as a consultant, keeping a notably low profile for someone whose name carries significant weight in the trade press. That period of discretion is now clearly over.
With his non-compete set to expire, Reynolds is taking the role with Best Cigar Prices and New Global, though he said he doesn't have specific plans at this stage. That candor is itself revealing. Reynolds isn't arriving at Best Cigar Prices with a turnaround mandate or a preloaded 100-day plan. Instead, he wants to be a resource for Fox, whether that be bouncing ideas off of him or working on specific projects. It's the posture of an operator who has seen enough large-company politics to appreciate the value of informal influence — someone who can pull the right lever at the right moment rather than imposing a corporate playbook onto an independent business that has thrived by operating differently.
Best Cigar Prices: From Trunk Sales to Cigar Compound
For those who know Best Cigar Prices primarily as an online retailer with competitive pricing, the full picture of what the company has grown into may come as a surprise. The story of Best Cigar Prices is genuinely an American small-business success story, one built over nearly three decades from almost nothing.
Best Cigar Prices is owned by New Global Marketing Inc., an independently-owned business started in upstate New York by Allan Blatt in 1996. Based out of an original residential headquarters in Stone Ridge, the founder began selling cigars out of the trunk of his car. That origin story — scrappy, bootstrapped, built on hustle — is part of the company's identity, and it explains why the culture at Best Cigar Prices operates so differently from the corporate machinery of an STG or a major manufacturer-backed operation.
In the late '90s, the company established Best Cigar Prices, subsequently relocating to Pennsylvania in 2011 where it's now headquartered. The facility has since grown to a centralized cigar compound that includes a retail shop, cigar-friendly bar and restaurant, a 15,000 square-foot inventory warehouse, corporate offices and fulfillment center. That physical footprint — a place where a guy can walk in, sit at the bar, order a drink, light up a premium stick, and browse a humidor stocked with thousands of SKUs — is a completely different animal from a pure e-commerce operation. It's a destination experience, and in an era where cigar lounges have become gathering places for communities of enthusiasts, that brick-and-mortar identity carries real brand value.
Best Cigar Prices includes an online retail operation, a physical store in Drums that has a full bar and kitchen, as well as a wholesale distribution arm, Alliance Cigar. That three-pronged structure — direct-to-consumer online, in-person retail with an experiential angle, and B2B wholesale distribution — is essentially the same architecture Reynolds spent years building and refining at Cigars International. The institutional overlap between what Reynolds knows how to do and what Best Cigar Prices is trying to become could hardly be more precise.
The Alliance Cigar Merger: A Turning Point
The addition of Alliance Cigar to the Best Cigar Prices family was the single biggest signal yet that Greg Fox and New Global Marketing are playing for a larger stake in the industry. New Global Marketing, Inc., operating as Best Cigar Prices, and Humicon L.L.C., operating as Alliance Cigar, announced the strategic merger of Alliance into the New Global family, with Alliance operating as its premier B2B wholesale division alongside Best Cigar Prices, one of the leading online B2C cigar retailers in the country.
Tom Sullivan and Steve Kallinikos joined the leadership team as Executive Vice Presidents of Alliance, and as shareholders with board representation in the combined companies, while Greg Fox continued in his leadership as President and CEO of Best Cigar Prices, Best Cigar Pub, and now Alliance. Sullivan, who founded Alliance, brought nearly three decades of wholesale distribution experience with him. Alliance is a large customer for many cigar companies, able to service retailers that may not have the required licenses to purchase directly from the cigar companies themselves or may not want to place an order that meets the minimum order threshold. That's a critical niche in the distribution chain, and folding it into the New Global family gave Best Cigar Prices immediate influence over a wide swath of the independent retail market in the Northeast.
The combined entity now touches the industry at multiple layers — manufacturing relationships, wholesale distribution, online consumer sales, and in-person retail with lifestyle amenities. That's not an accident. It's a deliberate architecture that mirrors what the major players have built over decades, assembled here by an independent company in a fraction of the time.
Why This Hire Makes Sense Right Now
The timing of Reynolds' appointment isn't incidental. The American premium cigar market has been in a state of competitive flux, with consolidation happening at the retail level even as small-batch and boutique manufacturers continue to proliferate. Best Cigar Prices has made multiple signals that it intends on being a larger player. The most notable is the merger with Alliance Cigar; however, it's also made other notable hires and added the Smoke-onos, a multi-vendor event somewhat reminiscent of Cigarfest, a multi-day Cigars International event that was once the largest consumer cigar event, though it was canceled during the COVID-19 pandemic and the concept has since changed.
That last detail is worth unpacking. Cigarfest, when it was running at full scale under Cigars International, was a marquee event in the American cigar calendar — a gathering that brought thousands of enthusiasts together with manufacturers for tastings, releases, and community building. Reynolds was there for that. He watched it grow into something significant, and he watched the pandemic shut it down. Now Best Cigar Prices is building its own version of that experiential model through Smoke-onos. Who better to advise on what works, what doesn't, and what mistakes to avoid than the person who had a front-row seat to the original?
All of that should be quite familiar to Reynolds, who spent more than a decade at Scandinavian Tobacco Group. His fluency in the operational realities of both large-scale online retail and physical cigar destination experiences gives him a unique vantage point for advising a company that is actively trying to build exactly that combination at a smaller, more agile scale.
What Reynolds Brings to the Table
Executive advisory roles are sometimes dismissed as ceremonial — a title without real substance, granted to industry legends as a form of flattery. This appointment doesn't look like that. Reynolds spent years managing an organization that was simultaneously a manufacturing business, a catalog retailer, an online retailer, a physical multi-store retailer, and a major B2B distribution player. Best Cigar Prices is now all of those things, or is rapidly becoming them. Reynolds has seen that movie before. He's seen it during the sequel and the remake.
His understanding of supplier relationships alone could be invaluable to Best Cigar Prices. When you've run General Cigar Co. — the manufacturer behind brands like Macanudo and CAO — you have a very particular understanding of how manufacturers think about their retail partners, what they want from distribution arrangements, and where the leverage in those conversations actually sits. For an independent retailer trying to deepen relationships with major manufacturers and secure competitive pricing and exclusive products, having Reynolds in the room — or even accessible by phone — changes the dynamic.
Reynolds also brings an understanding of consumer event strategy that is arguably more detailed than anyone currently working in independent retail. The Cigars International Cigarfest model demonstrated that cigar enthusiasts will travel, spend money, and build intense brand loyalty when an event delivers real value — access to makers, exclusive products, and a genuine sense of community. The Smoke-onos concept Best Cigar Prices is developing is an opportunity to capture that energy at a moment when there is no obvious successor to what Cigarfest once was. Reynolds knows exactly what that opportunity looks like.
The Independent vs. Corporate Divide in Premium Cigars
One of the more interesting dynamics in this story is the contrast between the two worlds Reynolds has inhabited. For more than a decade, he operated within a publicly traded Scandinavian corporate structure, navigating the compliance requirements, reporting pressures, and organizational complexity that come with that environment. Scandinavian Tobacco Group holds market-leading positions in the machine-made cigar market in Europe, the handmade cigar market in the US, the online and catalogue retail sales of cigars in the US, the traditional pipe tobacco market globally, and in selected fine-cut tobacco markets. Operating at that scale means virtually every decision has institutional weight.
Best Cigar Prices operates in a fundamentally different register. Best Cigar Prices is proudly American owned and operated, and that independence is both a point of pride and a strategic advantage. Decisions can be made faster, relationships can be more personal, and the company can take risks that a corporate structure would strangle in committee. Best Cigar Prices is one of the largest and fastest growing online cigar retailers in the U.S., established in 1997, with its global headquarters located in Drums, Pennsylvania, known as the heart of cigar country.
For Reynolds, stepping into an advisory role at an independent operation likely has its own appeal. After years of operating within STG's global hierarchy and then navigating a non-compete that limited his options, the chance to apply his expertise without the overhead of a corporate reporting structure is a different kind of professional freedom. He isn't being asked to run the company. He's being asked to make it smarter — and that is a role that plays squarely to his strengths.
An Industry Reading the Tea Leaves
In the premium cigar world, executive moves are watched closely by manufacturers, retailers, distributors, and serious enthusiasts alike. When a figure of Reynolds' stature aligns with a specific company, it functions as a signal — a public declaration that this operation is worth taking seriously. It tells manufacturers that Best Cigar Prices has access to someone who understands the highest levels of the business. It tells competitors that this Pennsylvania-based independent isn't content to occupy its current market position. And it tells customers that the people running the company are thinking about growth, experience, and quality in a serious way.
The constellation of moves Best Cigar Prices has made in a short period — the Alliance Cigar merger, the Smoke-onos events, the notable hires, and now Reynolds' advisory appointment — paints a picture of a company in active build mode. Greg Fox is assembling the kind of advisory and leadership infrastructure that independent retailers rarely invest in, typically because they're too focused on day-to-day operations to zoom out to the strategic level. Reynolds' presence at the table is part of that zoom-out.
For the American cigar enthusiast, the practical implications are worth watching. When a retailer with Best Cigar Prices' pricing power and growing operational footprint adds the strategic counsel of someone who spent years building the largest cigar retail empire in the world, the potential for improved product selection, better consumer events, deeper manufacturer partnerships, and a more compelling in-store and online experience is real. The combination of Fox's entrepreneurial energy and Reynolds' institutional knowledge is the kind of pairing that tends to produce tangible results over time — not just in press releases, but in what actually ends up in your humidor.
